After a brief Twitter hoax threatened to derail Andrew Cuomo's entire Governorship online presence, the Gov has moved to @NYGovCuomo and has been mundanely updating about ethics training and staff meetings ever since. But the fake Cuomo feed @NYGovernor is still up, and the prankster behind it spoke to the Times about why he did it. It turns out Andrew Cuomo was just too slow for his own Twitter site.
Nicholas M. Fahrenkopf, a PhD student at University of Albany, said he went to Cuomo's official website over the weekend, which featured links to his Flickr, Facebook and Twitter profiles. However, when Fahrenkopf clicked on @NYGovernor he found that the profile had not yet been created. "So I signed up, grabbed some images from the Web site and started following people,” he said. And even though his initial bio raised some eyebrows ("First elected Governor of the State of New York since the Luv Guv. @shellysilver calls me Mario's Kid. I live with @sandrashm and like classic cars") people believed him.
Cuomo's office said they had decided on @NYGovCuomo but had accidentally left the wrong link on the website. The link is now changed, but Fahrenkoph's site is doing nearly as well, with 509 followers compared to Cuomo's 601. His fake bio now reads, "Fake NYGovernor account previously featured on the homepage of the real Governor. @shellysilver calls me Mario's Kid. I live with @sandrashm & like muscle cars," and he now updates under the moniker Andrew P. Cuomo, the P standing for "Phony." Meanwhile, @sandrashm is kicking both of their asses, with 5,901 followers. Nobody can compete with the Kwanzaa Cake.
